Revisiting RowHammer: An Experimental Analysis of Modern DRAM Devices and Mitigation Techniques 🔗
This work finds that existing mechanisms either are not scalable or suffer from prohibitively large performance overheads in future devices based on the observed trends of RowHammer vulnerability. And consequently, it is critical to research more effective solutions to RowHammer.
Strengths
- This work experimentally studies the dynamic trend of rowhammer on many DRAMs. Its focus on rowhammer characterization is quite valuable and provided many insights over the essence of rowhammer.
- The authors are really good at summarizing valuable observations, though it is hard to digest all of them quickly.
Weaknesses
Why we have to use scalable mitigation technologies? I think Designing new technology when new chips are out is not a problem.
In the experiments, why temperature is so important, not other environmental factors like humidity?
The selection of mitigation methods is not mentioned.
Can you do better?
I would explain the reason to choose such number of dram chips from different manufacturers and whether they are enough.
I would include thoes mitigation methods in the related work parts and make a more comprehensive summary.
Takeways
I really appreciate the HC (rowhammer count) variable, which serves as a key metric to measure both the evolution of DRAM chips as well as the mitigation technology. Sometimes, quantification could be very simple and effective.
Other Comments
This work includes the machenism of rowhammer, the evolution over iterations of DRAM and respective mitigation technologies, and the importance of further effort. It really works as a bridge between the history and future.